Monthly Archives: April 2009

Is Twitter making us stupider?

InformationWeek’s Fritz Nelson ponders the question, and discusses it with me in a podcast.

Nelson also points to a memorable video clip that I somehow missed, in which Stephen Colbert clears up the confusion about the proper perfect-tense form of the verb “to twitter”:

This may well be my most multimediatastic post ever.

Tim writes a book

Tim wrote a book. The title of Tim’s book is The Twitter Book. Tim didn’t use a pen to write his book. Tim didn’t even use a word processor to write his book. Tim used PowerPoint to write his book. Tim wrote his book very fast, as fast, he says, as he writes “a new talk.” There are pictures in Tim’s book. Pictures, Tim says, “are a memorable, entertaining way to tell a story.” Tim says he is “reinventing the book in the age of the web.” Tim’s book was a lot easier to write than an old-fashioned book would have been. “All I needed to do,” Tim says, “was to write down some notes equivalent to what I’d be saying if I were giving this as a talk.” Sometimes, says Tim, old-fashioned authors “lose track of their plot details.” That didn’t happen to Tim. It’s “much easier,” he says, “to work on things in standalone units.” Tim’s book is a lot easier to read, too. “Most books still use the old model of a sustained narrative as their organizational principle,” Tim says. Tim’s book uses “a modular structure.” Following “a sustained narrative” is hard. With Tim’s book, each page “can be read alone (or at most in a group of two or three).” Tim says that “modularity isn’t the only thing that publishers can learn from new media.” The web, he says, “provides countless lessons about how books need to change when they move online.” I like the web. I’m glad that books are going to be more like the web. I’m glad that Tim wrote a book.

The fickle Twitterer

The biggest crowd on the web today is the one streaming through Twitter’s entryway. The second biggest crowd on the web today is the one streaming through Twitter’s exit.

Twitter’s recent growth has been explosive, even by web standards. The number of Twitter users doubled last month, reaching an estimated 14 million. This month, with Ashton’s Million Follower March and Oprah’s First Tweet, the Twitter flock has almost certainly swelled even more quickly. Everybody who’s anybody is giving Twitter a whirl.

But a whirl does not a relationship make. According to a study out today from Nielsen, at least three out of every five people who sign up for a Twitter account bail within a few weeks:

Currently, more than 60 percent of Twitter users fail to return the following month, or in other words, Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent. For most of the past 12 months, pre-Oprah, Twitter has languished below 30 percent retention.

Even Oprah, it seems, may already be losing interest. Of the 20 tweets she’s issued since joining Twitter 11 days ago, half came on her first day. She’s made nary a tweet in the last four days.

The half-life of a microblog, it turns out, is even briefer than the half-life of a blog.

When MySpace and Facebook were at the stage that Twitter is at today, their retention rates were, according to Nielsen, twice as high – and they’ve now stabilized at nearly 70 percent. Twitter’s high rate of churn will, if it continues, hamstring the service’s growth, says Nielsen’s David Martin: “A retention rate of 40 percent will limit a site’s growth to about a 10 percent reach figure … There simply aren’t enough new users to make up for defecting ones after a certain point. [Twitter] will not be able to sustain its meteoric rise without establishing a higher level of user loyalty.”

The FT’s David Gelles says that Twitter’s weak retention numbers “give good reason to think that Facebook, with its 200m users and robust retention rates, has little to fear from the flurry of interest in Twitter.” That remains to be seen. Even a modest boost in Twitter’s retention rate would improve its long-term prospects significantly. But if Nielsen’s numbers are accurate, and if they don’t improve, Twitter may turn out to be the CB radio of Web 2.0.

The unripened word

He was off by two centuries and a medium or two, but it was, nevertheless, the French poet and bureaucrat Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de Lamartine who, in an 1831 letter, foretold all:

Before this century shall run out, Journalism will be the whole press – the whole human thought. Through that prodigious multiplication which art has given to speech – multiplication to be multiplied a thousand-fold yet – mankind will write their book day by day, hour by hour, page by page. Thought will spread abroad in the world with the rapidity of light; instantly conceived, instantly written, instantly understood, at the extremities of earth, it will spread from pole to pole. Sudden, instant, burning with the fervor of soul which made it burst forth, it will be the reign of the human soul in all its plenitude. It will not have time to ripen, to accumulate into the form of a book – the book will arrive too late. The only book possible from today is a Newspaper.

Today, I went out and picked my copy of the Sunday New York Times off the dirt, shucked off its damp plastic wrapper, and felt like a mug. I had already seen all the headlines on the web; the cover story of the magazine had been up on the Times’s site forever. I pay good money for my subscription – I keep the goddamn newsroom afloat – and the Times treats me with contempt. It laughs in my face.

But what choice does it have?

The Newspaper arrives too late. The only Newspaper possible from today is a Text. A Tweet. Sudden, instant, burning with the fervor of soul which made it burst forth.

Unripeness is all.

A hundred years ago, James Gordon Bennett Jr., editor of the New York Herald, was criticized for the inconsistency of his paper. He replied: “I bring the paper out every day. Advertisement dwells in a one-day world.”

Media define our conception of time. The one-day world is gone. Today it’s a one-minute world. Today it’s a one-second world. Today it’s realtime.

Writing of the arrival of radio, Harold Innis, the economic historian who taught McLuhan everything he knew, observed, in his 1951 book The Bias of Communication:

The radio accentuated the importance of the ephemeral and of the superficial … The demands of the new media were imposed on the older media, the newspaper and the book. With these powerful developments time was destroyed and it became increasingly difficult to achieve continuity or to ask for a consideration of the future.

We think we’re special with our high technology. But we’re merely living out a fate ordained centuries ago when the distribution of the word was originally mechanized. Time is in pieces. We shake them as a baby shakes its rattle.

This post is an installment in Rough Type’s ongoing series “The Realtime Chronicles,” which began here.

Clutter

Tim Bray, the software writer and self-professed “sicko deranged audiophile,” is getting rid of his jewel cases. He’s been ripping his large collection of CDs into digital files and tweaking his hifi setup to play music off hard drives rather than disks. “I can’t wait to shovel the disks into boxes or binders or whatever, and regain a few square feet of wall,” he says. I’m with him there. The CD jewel case is the single worst technology ever invented by man. It defines, in a truly Platonic sense, the term “piece of crap.”

Now, Bray is looking forward to the fast-approaching day when he’ll also be able to get rid of his many books, leaving his walls even emptier. Their contents, too, will be digitized, turned into files that can be displayed on a handy e-book reader like Amazon’s Kindle. He writes: “I’ve long felt a conscious glow when surrounded by book-lined walls; for many years my vision of ideal peace included them, along with a comfy chair and music in the air. But as I age I’ve started to feel increasingly crowded by possessions in general and media artifacts in particular.” Physical books, he says, “are toast,” and that’s “a good thing.”

He has a sense that removing the “clutter” of his books, along with his other media artifacts, will turn his home into a secular version of a “monastic cell”: “I dream of a mostly-empty room, brilliantly lit, the outside visible from inside. The chief furnishings would be a few well-loved faces and voices because it’s about people not things.” He is quick to add, though, that it will be a monastic cell outfitted with the latest data-processing technologies. Networked computers will “bring the universe of words and sounds and pictures to hand on demand. But not get dusty or pile up in corners.”

It’s a nice dream, and a common one: the shucking off of material possessions to achieve a purer, spiritually richer life. But there’s a deep, perhaps even tragic, flaw in Bray’s thinking, at least when it comes to those books. He’s assuming that a book remains a book when its words are transferred from printed pages to a screen. But it doesn’t. A change in form is always, as well, a change in content. That is unavoidable, as history tells us over and over again. One reads an electronic book differently than one reads a printed book – just as one reads a printed book differently than one reads a scribal book and one reads a scribal book differently than one reads a scroll and one reads a scroll differently than one reads a clay tablet.

The author Steven Johnson, in an essay in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, praises many of the new features of digital e-book readers, but he’s under no illusion that books will make the transition from page to screen unchanged. We’re going to lose something along the way. That became clear to him the moment he began using his new Kindle:

I knew then that the book’s migration to the digital realm would not be a simple matter of trading ink for pixels, but would likely change the way we read, write and sell books in profound ways … Because they have been largely walled off from the world of hypertext, print books have remained a kind of game preserve for the endangered species of linear, deep-focus reading. Online, you can click happily from blog post to email thread to online New Yorker article – sampling, commenting and forwarding as you go. But when you sit down with an old-fashioned book in your hand, the medium works naturally against such distractions; it compels you to follow the thread, to stay engaged with a single narrative or argument. [As reading shifts to networked devices,] I fear that one of the great joys of book reading – the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author’s ideas – will be compromised. We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.

Whatever its charms, the online world is a world of clutter. It’s designed to be a world of clutter – of distractions and interruptions, of attention doled out by the thimbleful, of little loosely connected bits whirling in and out of consciousness. The irony in Bray’s vision of a bookless monastic cell is that it was the printed book itself that brought the ethic of the monastery – the ethic of deep attentiveness, of contemplativeness, of singlemindedness – to the general public. When the printed book began arriving in people’s homes in the late fifteenth century, it brought with it, as Elizabeth Eisenstein describes in her magisterial history The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, “the same silence, solitude, and contemplative attitudes associated formerly with pure spiritual devotion.”

When Tim Bray throws out his books, he may well have a neater, less dusty home. But he will not have reduced the clutter in his life, at least not in the life of his mind. He will have simply exchanged the physical clutter of books for the mental clutter of the web. He may discover, when he’s carried that last armload of books to the dumpster, that he’s emptied more than his walls.

Hashmobs

Forget flashmobs. The new thing is the hashmob.

A flashmob is, in case it’s already slipped your mind, “a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual action for a brief time, then quickly disperse.” The term is, as Wikipedia continues, “generally applied only to gatherings organized via social media or viral emails, rather than those organized by public relations firms or for a publicity stunt.” Flashmobs had their moment of near-fame back in the middle years of this decade. I believe they were particularly popular in Finland.

Flashmobs were okay, but they had a couple of big downsides. First, they required you to go outside. Second, you had to, well, be in a flashmob. Both downsides are nicely illustrated in this video:

Hashmobs solve both problems by transferring the flashmob concept into a purely realtime environment. A hashmob is a virtual mob that exists entirely within the Twitter realtime stream. It derives its name not from any kind of illicit pipeweed but from the “hashtags” that are commonly used to categorize tweets. Hashtags take the form of a hash sign, ie, #, in front of a word or word-portmanteau, eg, #obama or #obamadog. The members of a hashmob gather, virtually, around a particular hashtag by labeling each of their tweets with said hashtag and then following the resulting hashtag tweet stream. Hashmobbers don’t have to subject themselves to the weather, and they don’t actually have to be in proximity to any other physical being. A hashmob is a purely avatarian mob, though it is every bit as prone to the rapid cultivation of mass hysteria as a nonavatarian mob.

The canonical example (to date) of a hashmob emerged a few days ago around the hashtag #amazonfail. Amazon.com, as the result of a foul-up relating to its classification system for products, temporarily removed gay-and-lesbian-themed books from its sales rankings. Soon after the snafu, or, if you wish, FAIL!, came to light, a trickle of tweets labeled #amazonfail started to drip from the realtime faucet. The trickle promptly turned into a raging torrent – thousands of angry tweets an hour. The resulting hashmob spent a day or two pillorying Amazon and spinning various imaginary conspiracy theories, some of the more ridiculous of which fingered Amazon as a member of an anti-gay cabal run by Mormon elders. Because journalists have become some of the most avid Twitterers, the #amazonfail hashmob quickly gained a good bit of press coverage.

And then, as it became clear that the reaction had far exceeded its cause, the hashmob slowly dispersed. Tag it #amazonfailfail.

If you’re not sufficiently adapted to realtime, you may wake up after an enjoyable day of hashmobbery feeling a touch of remorse. One #amazonfail hashmobber, Clay Shirky, aired his rue yesterday. Admitting that “the emotional pleasure of using the #amazonfail hashtag was intoxicating,” he wrote:

Though the #amazonfail event is important for several reasons, I can’t write about it dispassionately, because I was an enthusiastic participant in its use on Sunday. I was wrong, because I believed things that weren’t true. As bad as that was, though, far worse is the retrofitting of alternate rationales to continue to view Amazon with suspicion, rationales that would not have provoked the outrage we felt had they been all we were asked to react to in the first place …

Whatever stupidities Amazon is guilty of, none of them are hanging offenses. The problems they have with labeling and handling contested categories is a problem with all categorization systems since the world began … We know all that, but we’re no longer willing to cut Amazon any slack, because we don’t trust them, and we don’t trust them because we feel like they did something bad, even though we now know, intellectually, that they didn’t actually do the bad thing we’ve come to hate them for.

In his own post-mortem, Bill Thompson, the BBC tech blogger, was not so forgiving:

As I write this [Amazon] has claimed that the episode was an unfortunate [mistake] and does not reflect a new policy, and I’m tempted to believe that it was never their intention to delist or downgrade books that are about gay, lesbian, transsexual or bisexual issues – or those written by authors who are not aggressively heterosexual in their appetites … However they have clearly broken the bond of trust with a large number of their readers, and it will take a long time to recover.

Fortunately for Amazon, a “long time” in realtime is equal to about five minutes in clock time. Being beaten with the virtual pillows of a hashmob may not have been pleasant, but it’s not going to cause the company any permanent, or even passing, harm. It was a tempest in a tweetpot, a ripple in the stream.

This post is an installment in Rough Type’s ongoing series “The Realtime Chronicles,” which began here.